By Lucy Sussex
Fiction
The Shepherd's Crown
TERRY PRATCHETT
Doubleday, $45. Buy now on Booktopia
Most people never use their artistic gifts. Some, like the artist Adam Cullen, squander them. Others have them taken cruelly away. Such was the fate of the late Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), prolific and much-loved author of the Discworld series. In 2007, at the peak of his powers, he was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a form of Alzheimer's disease.
The Shepherd's Crown by Terry Pratchett.
It could have ended his creative life, but Pratchett fought back. He donated a £1 million ($2.17 million) to Alzheimer's research, an amount his fans matched. He made a documentary on assisted dying, although his cognitive impairment meant he fell outside the guidelines of Dignitas, losing the right to choose. It won a BAFTA award. And he kept writing, if at slightly less than his usual speed. He collaborated with SF author Stephen Baxter; and continued his exploration of his imaginary playground, the Discworld.
The form his disease took affected motor and visual skills, but not his memory or language. He had "lived behind a keyboard", now he dictated, using voice recognition software. His best-seller status meant he had an office of helpers; vital, since PCA affects the ability to read. He was ferociously intelligent, so that his books initially seemed unaffected. But by Unseen Academicals (2009) the edge was blunted. Last year's Raising Steam was almost unreadable. The characters lectured each other, when Pratchett had been a master of snappy dialogue.
The Shepherd's Crown, his final book, belongs to a series aimed at young adults, centred on young witch Tiffany Aching. They were among his best, very English pastorals, with a strong sense of place. Here, Pratchett revisited earlier novels, drawing in characters as if tying up loose threads. He always featured Death as a benevolent being, something that gave much comfort to readers facing their own mortality. Now, with his nearing dissolution undoubtedly in mind, he killed off Granny Weatherwax, perhaps his best-loved character. Moreover, he recaptured all his writerly powers to do it.
In the afterword Pratchett's assistant, Rob Wilkins, notes that if Pratchett had lived longer "he would have written more of this book", something implying a ghostwriter. In context, though, it seems Wilkins is referring to Pratchett's interminable revisions. This book is superb until chapter six, when some of the problems of Raising Steam – the confusion, the hectoring – recur. The battle between Tiffany and the evil faeries becomes an author's battle with his own failing powers. Pratchett wins, at the end, but is master of a curate's egg.
Not that it will affect his reputation. A critical book on Pratchett was subtitled: Guilty of Literature. When Pratchett was denounced recently by a The Guardian troll, professors of English responded with withering scorn.
He remains one of the great English comic writers, who happened to find fantasy the perfect vehicle. Pratchett was more inventive than J.K. Rowling and wider in range than Wodehouse, the Discworld an imaginative space allowing him to move from social satire to police procedurals with ease.
He was a grumpy old lefty with a perverse but ultimate belief in human goodness. Pratchett gave joy to millions of readers and his personal millions enriched good causes. The Shepherd's Crown is an uneven epitaph, but under the circumstances, a fitting one.